The Shrub Administration is on about radiological weapons again. Radiological weapons? Big freaking deal. I'm a smoker, bub. On my list of fears, radiological weapons are right up there with being mauled by a harp seal pup. I'm already resigned to dying of lung cancer. What's a radiological weapon going to do but up my chances by a few percentage points? So when these cats in their bad blue Republican suits start yammering about radiological weapons, I go from bored to comatose.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an idiot. A real live nuclear weapon, fission or fusion, scares the bejesus out of me. But I have a few brain cells, and a degree in biology, and I understand the concept of dilution, so a conventional explosive wrapped in radioactive material just isn't that scary. Bomb goes foom, and radioactive shit gets scattered all over hell and creation, which is the intrinsic problem with the device to begin with. If it's really effective at scattering crap all over, say, greater DC Metro, then the concentration of the crap is so minute that you could hardly distinguish it from background radiation.
NEWS FLASH: You're surrounded by radioactive materials all the time! A fair chunk of the carbon that is you is Carbon-14, an UNSTABLE RADIOATCTIVE ISOTOPE!!! My GOD, the horror. Every time you aren't in a lead-shielded bomb shelter, the sun is pelting you with visible light (radiation), ultraviolet light (radiation), xrays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays (all radiation) among many other forms of radiation.
The reason, gentle reader, that atomic weapons are so horrifying, apart from their ridiculously huge and intense initial blast, is that they create all kinds of novel forms of radioactive atoms in their wake. Many of these guys have half-lives (the time it takes half of the isotope to decay) of hours or days, and are intensely radioactive (read lethal). As a matter of fact, the more intense the radiation of an isotope, the faster it decays. It's an absolutely linear relationship. Add to that the fact that nukes make tons and tons of radioactive junk, and you have one horrifying weapon.
You COULD build a very scary dirty bomb using such fast-decaying isotopes that are extremely radioactive. There are, however, a few minor drawbacks to this plan. First, if the half-life is in the realm of hours or days, you have very little time to assemble and then use the bomb before it becomes just a regular old nonradioactive bomb surrounded by a bunch of useless crap. Secondly, you'll probably need several shifts of expendable bomb-builders, because you can't be that close to that hot a radiation source for any length of time without croaking. Remember, all the lethal radiation necessary to generate serious casualties for, say, a ten square mile area is packed into that little space of the bomb. Being near the bomb means that you are going to become ill in only a few minutes, and you're going to die in an hour, tops. Finally, you have to be able to produce those fast-decaying isotopes. You can't mine them; because they decay so fast you won't find them in nature. You actually have to bombard common isotopes with neutrons in, say, the blast from a nuclear weapon.
A second, more elegant type of bomb would actually produce those fast-decaying isotopes as it exploded. What do you have there? You guessed it, an actual nuclear bomb, optimized, as it were, for the production of very nasty things. These would indeed be terrifying weapons, but the technical requirements for making such a weapon are very high. Higher than building a simple fission bomb like the Hiroshima bomb.
So to make an effective dirty bomb, you need to have an effective nuclear weapons program. Doesn't sound like Al Quieda, does it? Anything these medieval marvels could scrape together would be a major nuisance, and might mean that some government contractor gets a lucrative cleanup and remediation contract that spans a decade. But it would produce limited, if any, casualties and frankly just isn't that scary.
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